


Kite Strings

by HyperLittleNori (Shiguresan)



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alpha Derek Hale, Comfort fic, Derek Hale & Sheriff Stilinski Bonding, Derek Hale Deserves Nice Things, Derek Hale Leaves, Derek Hale Leaves Beacon Hills, Fix-It, Fluff and Angst, Frottage, Getting Together, Gift Fic, Good Alpha Derek Hale, Happy Ending, Kissing, Light Angst, M/M, Pining, Post-Canon Fix-It, Post-Season/Series 04, Scott is a Good Friend, Stiles Stilinski Deserves Nice Things, feel good fic, sterek, wish fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-20
Updated: 2020-03-20
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:08:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,614
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23233747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shiguresan/pseuds/HyperLittleNori
Summary: He understood why after losing everything over and over, after finally finding himself in the ashes of the fire that had consumed his family, Derek had felt the need to get out. Stiles just couldn’t shake the sense of abandonment that had hung heavy in his chest ever since Derek had left.It felt like a part of him was still lost in that desert, like when Derek had turned away to get into his car, he’d turned away from him.
Relationships: Derek Hale/Stiles Stilinski
Comments: 47
Kudos: 614





	Kite Strings

**Author's Note:**

> A gift fic for Sammie, who asked for: _Derek leaves and stiles is depressed and Scott notices._ Sammie there isn’t as much Scott in this fic as I think your prompt suggested (the Stiles/Derek flashbacks kept sneaking in) but he’s still Stiles’s best bro and he does do his bit so I hope you still enjoy :)
> 
> **Notes for readers: for the sake of this fic, Stiles never slept with Malia and Derek never slept with Braeden. Post season 4 but you don’t need to kow the particulars, basically Derek leaves Beacon Hills, that’s all you need to know.**
> 
> I have no idea if this is any good, but the odd thing is I really loved writing it anyway? It's such a strange feeling but I loved writing every word of this for you Sammie I just hope it lives up to your expectations.

**Kite Strings**

It wasn’t as if Stiles didn’t understand the need to get away from Beacon Hills and all of the chaos that came with it. He got it, he did. Whatever plague had rotted away the inside of Kate Argent’s skull had contaminated the town, spread even beyond the reach of the Hale fire until it had started devouring the town itself like decay. His dad had even mentioned upping sticks when his term was over, to wherever Stiles settled after he went to college, to start anew away from the stink of it.

He understood why after losing everything over and over, after finally finding himself in the ashes of the fire that had consumed his family, Derek had felt the need to get out. Stiles just couldn’t shake the sense of abandonment that had hung heavy in his chest ever since Derek had left.

It felt like a part of him was still lost in that desert, like when Derek had turned away to get into his car, he’d turned away from him.

*

_One night, not long after the Nogitsune had torn through Beacon Hills, Stiles woke up at 3am drenched in sweat. Gasping for breath, he was momentarily frozen, momentarily reliving the all-too vivid memory of being a prisoner in his own body._

_Even months after the Nogitsune had been banished from his skin, Stiles still felt haunted by his shadow. He couldn’t say he blamed his friends for not seeing passed his mask of breezy recovery, he’d mastered the illusion by now, but sometimes he did wonder if his nervous energy or general exhaustion really went by unnoticed or if they just didn’t know what to say._

_His dad was the exception. His dad who ended up coming into him most nights to hold him like he was a small child. He felt entirely alone in the void the Nogitsune had left behind, even though he was surrounded by friendly faces. They didn’t know that the only nights he didn’t wake up screaming were the nights he was too exhausted to dream._

_When he could move again, shaky and breathing harsh, he forced himself into motion before his thoughts could drag him into the spiral of a panic attack. His routine gave him focus, helped the heavy weight of helplessness and feeling of weakness to abate enough that he could ground himself again. He tossed his sweat-soiled sheets into his hamper, redressed his bed with fresh ones and then dragged himself into the shower and washed until he stopped shaking._

_His dad tried to get the nights at home so he could be there for him, but on the nights he couldn’t he’d stop by en route whenever he could. Tonight was one of the latter and so Stiles turned on every light on his way down the stairs into the kitchen with his hamper in hand, chucking it all in the washing machine and setting the cycle to start before turning to fill a glass with water from the tap._

_It slipped from his hand, crashing to the floor in hundreds of tiny pieces as he caught sight of the shadow in the window of the backdoor. He jerked backward, slamming into the kitchen counter, heart thundering in his chest, even as glass and water scattered around his feet. His heart was still pounding even as he gritted his teeth in embarrassed irritation at the sight of Derek stepping through the door._

_He was probably the one person who could look both surly and sheepish and Stiles wasn’t even surprised that the asshole had the spare key from behind the porch light in his hand. He just sighed. So damn tired of being jumpy and just…tired._

_“What are you doing?” he demanded._

_Derek raised a brow. “Using the door.”_

_Stiles rolled his eyes, shifting tentatively on his bare toes as he bent to pick up the shards of wet glass glittering around his feet._

_“Stop.” Derek’s order was fast, firm, but in the same soft voice he always used. Instinctively, Stiles froze mid-motion, straightening up as Derek approached and swept the fragments into his hands._

_“Uhh, there’s like…a dustpan and brush under the sink. You know, it’ll hurt if you knick yourself, super-healing or no.”_

_Derek glanced up at him then. Stiles’s stomach tightened at the curious little look he gave him, the moment suspended in time, Derek’s eyes a curious burnished green from the light of the kitchen. Stiles licked his lips nervously, pulling himself up out of the way onto the counter and his motion seemed to jerk Derek back to reality. He cleared the mess with the dustpan and then tipped it into the trash, before turning back to where Stiles’s legs were swinging a little where they hung, fingers clenched around the edge of the countertop._

_Stiles wasn’t sure how long Derek watched him for, his own thoughts swirling, lost in the movement of the washing machine and the chaos of his own dilemma. But the next thing he knew, Derek was handing him a mug of milk, heated from the microwave. Stiles blinked at him, taking the warm cup on autopilot, grateful for something to wrap his still slightly shaky hands around to help anchor them._

_“Why are you here, Derek?” he asked, his voice a little more croaky than usual. He hadn’t seen Derek since he’d recovered from being a teenager or whatever it was that Kate had done to him._

_“I heard you screaming.”_

_Stiles winced. “Was I…was I that loud?”_

_Derek shook his head minutely and in the same soft, simple tone said, “I just heard.”_

_Did that mean Derek had just been passing? That maybe his super born-wolf hearing surpassed Scott’s alpha senses? Maybe his dad had asked Derek to check on him? Derek had been working with his dad on potentially supernatural cases a lot down the station since the great werewolf reveal. Even more since Derek had stood between Stiles, technically the Nogitsune, and Chris Argent’s gun._

_His mind reeled, pulse hammering along with his rapid thoughts, recalling his earlier screams, the salt of tears, the sobs that had wracked his already shaking frame in the shower. He didn’t even realise the state he’d worked himself into until warm, broad, surprisingly soft fingers closed around his wrist, stilling his wringing hands._

_Stiles’s head jerked up and their gazes met._

_There were flares of golden brown and blue flecked within the green. Derek didn’t look gentle or pitying or like he was worried Stiles might break, he just looked at him the same as always, brow slightly furrowed, grip firm._

_He didn’t let go and Stiles exhaled once, twice, in and out again and again until his breathing grew steadier. Slowly, slowly, Derek’s grip loosened and his hand slid down until both of his were cupping Stiles’s. It felt like the first warm touch in so long, when he’d pulled away from every touch lest the fragile glue holding him together shattered under the pressure of Lydia’s or Scott’s or his dad’s concern._

_Derek didn’t feel worried, or maybe a little but he mostly felt…knowing. Moistening his lips absently as he stared at where Derek’s fingers held him together, Stiles felt the creeping realisation that Derek knew what it was like. He knew what it was like to break apart and have to hold yourself together again. Knew what guilt felt like, knew what it was like to feel blood on your hands, even if it wasn’t necessarily from your own blow._

_He blinked back the treacherous glassiness from his eyes, the relief that rushed through him at his warmth. It was as if Derek could somehow suck the cold depression from his veins the way he drew pain away._

_Without any words passing between them, the warming presence guided him back to his room and Stiles settled onto his bed. Not relaxed exactly, but empty, devoid of anything in the most relieving, light and blissful way. When he twisted his head from where he rested, he saw Derek glancing back at him as he headed out the door and with the moonlight painting his features, Stiles wasn’t afraid when the lights went out._

_When Stiles woke much later, he found his laundry clean, dry and folded on the counter in a way his dad never would’ve done and he sent Derek a text._

_TO: Derek [11.49AM]_

_Take the spare key with you next time. In case you need it._

_TO: Derek [11.54AM]_

_And call out or something next time. Save a guy from a heart attack._

_TO: Derek [11.55AM]_

_Or you from a bullet if my dad’s home._

_FROM: Derek [11.59AM]_

_Cool._

_TO: Derek [12.04PM]_

_And you know. Thanks too._

_TO: Derek [12.05PM]_

_For being there._

_FROM: Derek [12.20PM]_

_You’re welcome._

*

On the drive back to Beacon Hills after the encounter with Kate and the berserkers, sans Derek, Stiles mulishly deleted Derek’s number from his phone.

The first day back at school for senior year, when he went to follow the unofficial rite of passage and write his initials on the bookshelf, he froze when he saw the D.H. in neat block capitals on the shelf above. Probably not _their_ ‘D.H.’ but it’d struck a raw, tender spot inside him nonetheless, cutting clean through the flimsy barriers of denial that had wrapped around him all summer. On the way out of the library, he snagged Scott’s phone and copied Derek’s number back into his.

Scott had given him a knowing look but had said nothing. He was the best that way.

*

About a week into his senior year, a postcard featuring Mayan ruins, with the watermark of a little gift shop in the corner arrived for him. Derek’s neat block capitals were on the back.

_DOING SOME SIGHTSEEING WITH CORA._

_PRETTY COOL._

_YOU’D LOVE IT._

_DEREK_

Something caught in Stiles’s throat that made it hard to swallow, made the loneliness of his empty house all the more palpable.

The next time Scott came into his room, he no doubt saw the little collection of postcards from various parts of South America but just gave Stiles a look.

*

_Stiles wasn’t even surprised when he climbed into his car outside the sheriff’s station to find Derek already sitting in the passenger seat._

_“Your dad is right,” Derek said without even looking at him as Stiles turned the ignition and pulled out onto the road. “You shouldn’t just head out to Mexico. If a true alpha couldn’t fight off the beserkers, what chance do you have?”_

_Stiles cut him a brief, impatient glance. “About the same chance as you while you’re all kryptonited.”_

_He_ felt _Derek roll his eyes without even turning his gaze from the road._

_“You just lied to your dad.”_

_“I lie to him all the time, it’s a necessary evil to protect his heart,” Stiles snapped. Then he shook his head. “There are times where his way of doing things are just too slow for the supernatural world, okay? And I know that he basically loves you more than me since you unofficially moved in but can you for once have my back on this?”_

_When he risked another quick look at Derek, he thought he saw a flicker of hurt in his eyes before it was blinked away._

_“So what is your plan?” Derek sighed._

_“Our plan, as the vice-alphas of our little pack, is to grab Malia, take her to Scott’s and see if she can get something we can use to catch a scent. Then we are going to rally the troops and go get Kira and Scott.” He flexed his fingers in an anxious rhythm around the steering wheel for a moment, chewing the inside of his mouth. “And if we’re back before my dad’s shift finishes tomorrow morning then he never has to know.”_

_Derek looked dubious, probably in equal parts of Malia’s control over her abilities and the idea that the Sheriff wouldn’t figure things out. He had to upmost respect for Stiles’s dad. It was sort of annoying really. Especially when his dad caught him eyeing Derek’s ass when he brewed the coffee in the morning after one of the nightly visits that no one spoke about but everyone understood._

_“Look, I know she’s still just getting the handle of things, but unless your sniffer is back in the game she’s our best shot,” Stiles insisted. When Derek didn’t respond, Stiles side-eyed him again at the lights. “So are we going to talk about that? Or are you going to keep letting everything else take priority?”_

_A scowl was levied his way._

_“You were born a werewolf, Derek, you can’t tell me this isn’t bothering you–”_

_“Of course it bothers me–”_

_“Then why haven’t you asked for any help? You never ask. Not if it’s for you. It’s like you don’t trust that I have your back, not even after…” He bit his tongue, hating the way his voice betrayed him._

_“If I didn’t trust you, I wouldn’t have told you about it in the first place,” Derek said bluntly, logically, stoically. If admitting in frustration after Stiles had wheedled and nagged and pestered him with invasive intensity until he’d given it up after that little incident at Deaton’s, that incident he’d tried to shrug off apart from a passing conversation with Deaton himself._

_Stiles flipped. “But you don’t trust me to take care of you!” He snapped. He stared down at Derek hard. “It’s not always your job to watch out for me, okay? Sometimes it’s your turn to be rescued and it doesn’t matter who the human or the werewolf or the alpha is.”_

_Derek’s nostrils flared as he exhaled roughly in annoyance, turning his head sharply just as the cars behind honked their horns. The light had gone green._

_Cursing under his breath, Stiles shoved the_ Jeep _into gear roughly and pulled away. After a long, tense moment, Derek murmured softly, albeit through gritted teeth, “you did save me. You have saved me. More than once.” He hesitated then, apparently drawing bravery from the fact that Stiles couldn’t look him in the eye and drive at the same time. “It’s not about not trusting you…”_

_Stiles sat back then slowly, rearing as if he’d been struck as he realised. “It’s about not feeling worth the effort.”_

_Derek’s gaze flicked up to him, hesitant and so much younger than Stiles had ever seen him. Slightly parted lips moved as if unbidden on the precipice of speech that never came. In the end, he turned his gaze to the window, silent until Stiles pulled up outside the school._

_“When I was in the desert, when I was…” his jaw tensed in frustration at his lack of words but he still didn’t look at Stiles. “I saw…_ dreamed _things, things about not being worth being saved, being an alpha. Being a Hale.” He hesitated for a moment, before reluctantly turning to meet Stiles’s gaze._

_The sun streamed in through the windows, breaking the cloud cover and highlighting the browns in his eyes as furls of golden smoke amid the green._

_Stiles felt his breath hitch._

_“I saw you a few times. And you’d tell me how to tell if I was awake or asleep.” His face coloured then and he made to reach for the door handle but Stiles’s own hand shot out to grasp his shoulder, to hold him in place as his heart thundered in his chest because…_

_“I told you about counting your fingers, right?” he breathed, feeling as if he’d been gut-punched._

_Frowning, Derek nodded._

_“Derek, I never told you that aloud, not while we were awake.”_

_When Derek’s frown only intensified, Stiles breathed out shakily, “Derek…I had the same dream.”_

_Green-hazel eyes widened and Stiles knew a moment of…_ something _where his stomach jolted, lurching upward. Then whatever Derek had been about to say was cut off by Malia knocking on the window of the_ Jeep _, Liam close behind her._

*

The tenth postcard was one of those snapshot, send your own photo from your phone and we print it kind of deal. It featured the top of Cora’s head in selfie-mode, mainly focussing on Derek behind her. Derek on horseback, with a damned cowboy hat.

TO: Derek [6.04PM]

What do the horses think of werewolves?

He’d really wanted to make a comment about how Derek looked in the hat but any witty comment he thought of felt flirtatious and dangerously close to the truth.

FROM: Derek [8.43PM]

They hated Cora. Didn’t mind me so much.

They didn’t text much. In truth, Stiles felt like a needy ex-boyfriend or something whenever he did, but the postcards felt like an invitation to make contact. Made him feel like Derek wanted to hear from him, like he wasn’t just some charity case. He couldn’t say if they made him feel better or worse though. Better, less depressed, but worse because it made him miss Derek more.

*

They’d talked about it before, if ‘talked about’ meant Derek’s style of cryptic mic-drop revelations in the midst of danger or right before leaping out of his window, or being eviscerated or whatever. Little snippets of obscure hints that never really made sense on their own. It was only in Derek’s absence that Stiles began to piece it all together.

The way his stomach lurched upward like an excited bird fluttering somewhere in the vicinity of his ribs when his bedroom window opened one night during winter break was probably his biggest clue as to what was going on. Or at least one of the things going on. The way it sank just a little at the sight of Scott climbing over the sill was even more telling.

“You’ve had a key since you were like ten, Scotty, why the window?”

Scott shrugged with an abashed little smile, closing the window behind him to shut out the evening chill. “Your dad was asleep on the sofa, didn’t want to wake him. Can I hang?”

Stiles nodded, turning back to finish off the last bit of his essay he’d been working on. When he turned back to Scott, he was sitting cross-legged with socked feet on the end of Stiles’s bed, demolishing someone on _Titanfall._ Stiles took a seat beside him and picked up a controller.

He had to hand it to them, they hadn’t given up on him, even though he hadn’t been the best company in the last year or so. For good reasons, but still.

Scott still dropped in to game and Lydia still turned up to help him study, their own subtle ways of letting him know they were still there, that they still cared. Showing their support the only way they could without really asking him the obviously stupid question ‘are you okay’. Because of course he wasn’t, but he was getting better. Slowly.

And why, when it came down to it, did it bother him so much that Derek didn’t do the same anymore? Because in the months before he’d left, he’d hung out with Stiles? Stayed in the spare bedroom more nights than not? He was hardly the texting type, Stiles knew that, knew he was practically a technology-phobe, that it wasn’t personal. Except it _felt_ personal because there had been something there. He wasn’t crazy and it was _making_ him crazy that Derek had just left without acknowledging it.

He and Scott talked while they gamed, like they usually did and when Scott mentioned how he and Kira were doing pretty well, but that things were overshadowed a little by losing Alison. Scott felt disrespectful somehow and Kira was really great about it, about Scott’s connection to her.

“She was sort of your anchor. Still is,” Stiles amended distantly as he played through the game on autopilot. “Hard to compete with that, I guess.”

“She’s super cool. Like…she knows I’m not in love with Allison, but that it’s still hard, you know? She gets this cute little crinkle around her eyes when she understands something, like, profound, or whatever. She’s amazing.”

Stiles elbowed him suggestively, just to break the tension, only to earn himself one in return. When the game ended and they were floating in the lobby, waiting to find another match, he felt his lips part in a question before he could even stop himself. “Do you miss her?” he asked, voice soft and tentative, all amusement gone, only wistful.

Scott looked at him fully. “Well…yeah, I do. I mean…a part of me will always miss her. And I’m pretty sure I would even she wasn’t my anchor, you know?”

Eyes still on the timer as the server found a match for them, Stiles admitted shakily, “I think I miss Derek.” When Scott didn’t answer, he turned his head to meet Scott’s eyes, wide with surprise.

“Dude,” Scott began, “that’s…I mean I knew you hung out a lot after the Nogitsune and during the deadpool crap but I didn’t realise you were…”

Stiles blinked. “What? No. _No_ , we didn’t…I mean we aren’t…” He exhaled through his nose in frustration. “I mean…maybe I thought that we might have, if he hadn’t…” He punctuated his broken off sentence with a gesture toward the window, to the world beyond where he’d stood out in the desert and watched Derek drive away from him.

“But you were talking about….” Scott frowned. Then comprehension seemed to dawn. “ _Oh._ ”

“Well, I mean I _thought_ he did, that I was. But he never said it, we never talked about it and we talked about a lot near the end and surely if I was, well… _either_ of those things to him then he couldn’t have just up and left?”

“Well…I mean, yeah? The anchor doesn’t keep you grounded in place, it keeps you grounded in yourself. It doesn’t control your feelings or thoughts, your thoughts and feelings are what decides it, you know? So…maybe you made him feel strong enough to head out there and find himself. When Allison went away with her dad after her mom died, that didn’t stop her being my anchor.”

Stiles nodded but he still didn’t get it. It didn’t make any sense. He’d been so sure, especially that last night, before it’d all kicked off.

“It’s not something I can explain and it’s not…I wasn’t born this way. I’m still figuring all this out and I’m not sure if it’s the same for everyone. It might be…it might be different to what I feel, you know?”

“I really don’t, dude.”

Scott had looked pained and frustrated all at once. “Okay, like…for me, with Allison, it was like I could hear her voice from miles away if I concentrated hard enough. I could pick her heartbeat out from across the school. It felt like…when we made that first connection, when I realised she made me a better me, the me I _wanted_ to be, my heartbeat reset to match hers or something. Even now she’s gone it still beats the same, to her rhythm. She tethers me, focuses me no matter what, even at the moon.”

Stiles swallowed, bringing moisture to his suddenly dry throat. “Like an anchor?”

“Yeah,” Scott considered him uncertainly. “Yeah. She makes me feel focussed. Like how you concentrate better when you listen to that _Lord of the Rings OST_ you call your ‘productivity jam’, you know?”

The idea of him being Derek’s _Requiem for a Dream_ was…

But Allison was still Scott’s anchor, even though she wasn’t the one he loved, so it was possible he was one for Derek without being the other, right? So Derek might not…

He swallowed thickly.

“Are you saying I’m Derek’s productivity jam?”

“Well, I don’t know. I mean I’m not sure how much it varies per wolf but, yeah, maybe? Like…you’re the song that makes him feel inspired, makes him feel like he can do anything and he can listen to that song wherever he is, wherever you are, even when he’s not with you. And that’s…that doesn’t define how he feels about you. His feelings are what makes it possible.”

Stiles didn’t know what to do with that.

*

_Sometimes he didn’t dream of the Nogitsune. Sometimes he dreamt he was floating in nothingness, surrounded by the cold-sweat inducing fear the Nogitsune had inspired in him. He dreamt of blinding white that stung his eyes, with blinding pressure of an oncoming panic attack. But sometimes in those dreams, warm, broad fingers, surprisingly soft against his cheeks would anchor him in the chaos._

_Sometimes when his dad worked nights, most times that his dad worked nights actually, Derek would let himself into the house. He never gave an excuse, just let himself in usually as Stiles was preparing dinner for himself, or even just before, with a take-out in hand. Usually he just sort of lounged in whatever room Stiles was in at the time, reading or watching the TV with him. A couple of times he even helped him with the backlog of homework that he’d been buried under since the start of the Nogitsune fiasco._

_He was this warm presence, this comfort that was somehow easier than Lydia, Scott or even his dad. Because he didn’t have to be okay in front of Derek. Derek already knew. He knew when to let Stiles brood because he’d had a tough day, knew when to goad and tease him. But most of all he didn’t give Stiles that pitying look when he woke from a particularly difficult flashback, or when the dawn came and Stiles clearly hadn’t slept a wink._

_“Why is Allison still Scott’s anchor?” Stiles asked him one night out on the back porch, wrapped up in his duvet to brace against the cold with Chinese take-out in his lap._

_Derek’s gaze flicked up to Stiles as he sucked the noodles from his chopsticks. Stiles swallowed self-consciously when he caught his own eyes following the motion of Derek’s tongue across his sauce-splashed lips. If he realised he’d tucked his feet under Stiles’s duvet he didn’t act like it._

_“Death doesn’t always change things.”_

_Stiles dropped his gaze to his own chow mein, twirling his chopsticks in the noodles, just for something to distract himself with. “But…yours was family, right? Before the…before?” He took a swig of the coffee he’d brought out with him, but even the caffeine wasn’t helping to calm his jitters tonight._

_That nightmare had shaken him, sending him spinning out into dark chaos like a lone figure floating helpless through space, until two firm hands had dragged him back. Except they’d pulled him into a disfigured reflection of the night he and Derek had spent floating in the pool. He’d felt his muscles screaming with exhaustion as real as if it were happening all over again._

_But the flicker of the dream brought with it a startling new viewpoint, the idea that any other sixteen-year-old’s muscles_ would _have given out trying to stay afloat with Derek’s dead weight of muscle in his hold. Except there had been the rush of adrenaline, and something more, an overwhelming,_ empowering _frisson of pulsing, bone quivering heat that shook him like a defibrillator._

_When he’d awoken, it had felt so real he hadn’t been sure which was the more accurate recollection, the dream or the memory. Or were they one in the same?_

_Stiles wasn’t a swimmer. He could swim but he wasn’t particularly skilled and looking back, it seemed impossible that he could’ve kept them both afloat like that for so long. He wasn’t sure what had shaken him more upon waking to feel Derek jostling him gently from his murmuring nightmares, the part of the dream with the empty void or the idea that he’d been missing something so important all along._

_He drained his coffee and picked up his chow mein again, just for something to occupy his hands. His appetite had long-since vanished. “What makes it change?” he pressed gently. “Why did death affect your anchor but not Scott’s?”_

_Derek exhaled shakily, his breath coming out in a subtle mist in the night. “It’s dependant on the person, not the anchor itself. Allison may always be Scott’s anchor, she may not. It’s down to him. In my experience it changes when the wolf themself changes profoundly.”_

_Stiles nodded. “Makes sense. Scott’s changed a lot in a lot of ways, but deep down, he’s the same old Scotty that stuck by me in the kindergarten sandpit when I peed myself and no one else wanted to be my friend.” He winced, embarrassed about admitting that but Derek only smirked with open, unfettered amusement. Unself-conscious. “You’ve changed a lot though,” Stiles added, more softly. “For the better, I mean. You’ve overcome a lot. You should be proud of yourself. I bet your family would be.”_

_That look again, that startled, vulnerable wide-eyed stare of a man so much younger, of the sixteen year old that never got to finish growing up and learning to trust people._

_“Is your anchor still anger?” Stiles asked after a long silence stretching toward the oncoming dawn. Derek focussed on the skyline above the rooftops of Stiles’s neighbours and after a beat, he murmured…_

_“No. It’s not.”_

_A glance up showed an odd look on Derek’s face, as if he’d just figured something out, like something had just slotted into place. But then the low rumble of a car filled the deathly quiet street and then the flash of headlights illuminated the road before the sheriff’s cruiser pulled onto the driveway. It was a tribute to how often Derek was there that the sheriff didn’t even look surprised as he caught sight of them, just offered the both a tired smile._

_“Any left for me?”_

_“Some egg-fried rice and sweet and sour chicken left for you, Pops. The suck up ordered extra for you,” Stiles offered, perhaps overcompensating a little for his embarrassment at the awkward intimacy his dad had interrupted._

_With his next hurried mouthful, Stiles managed to miss his mouth spectacularly and the aftermath of stunned realisation faded from Derek’s face, shifting into a twist of amusement._

_“I could make a comment about how you managed to miss a mouth that big,” Derek mused with a teasing smile he hid behind his glass when Stiles began to splutter his protests._

_*_

The next handful of postcards all came close together, from different national forests around Idaho. One, however, was another of those ‘postcards from your phone’ things printed with a candid shot of Derek starting a fire near dusk. He wasn’t looking at the camera but there was a faraway, wistful look in his eyes that made Stiles think Cora took it without him noticing.

There was no message on the back and Stiles wondered what message Cora was trying to send him through the picture alone, if any at all.

*

Obsessive rumination was something he’d been fairly proficient in ever since he was small. Every night he’d lay in bed replaying every time his mouth got him into trouble at school, all the things he could’ve said or done differently, better. The weeks and months that followed the showdown in the desert were full of it. Gradually he began to feel better in himself, but there was a hollowness he couldn’t shake, something missing from the madness of exams and finals and the run up to graduation.

His

It came to him in quiet moments, before he was drifting off to sleep or on the drive home, on the nights where his dad worked late and the TV couldn’t occupy his mind. The unknown and all of the hundreds of ways he might’ve been able to change it.

Sometimes he contemplated sending an aloof text or even an email. It wasn’t that he didn’t know what to say, that had never stopped him before, it was more that he was worried Derek’s reply or lack thereof might confirm his worst fear of all, that there was _nothing_ he could’ve done that would’ve changed it.

In her variation of sympathy, Lydia would say he was heartbroken with affectionate teasing and Scott would give him that uncomfortable, awkward look like he didn’t know what to say for the best. So he just said nothing, just clapped Stiles on the arm or squeezed his shoulder in that useless but understanding way.

Until one day, after finals were over, he let himself into Stiles’s bedroom while Stiles was busy doing some very important catch-up on _Warcraft._ He dropped a college application leaflet on his desk.

Stiles blinked at it. “Uhh…it’s a little late for applications, Scotty, and I’ve already applied to that one anyway. I’ve applied to nearly _all_ the–”

“It’s got a letter of recommendation request attached,” Scott said, just staring at him as if Stiles were meant to know what that meant.

“ _Okay_. I’ve gotta say, I don’t think I’m qualified to write that for you, bro. And what would I say anyway? He’s a great alpha. Some issues early on but definitely getting there in terms of–”

“ _Stiles_ ,” Scott said exasperatedly. “It’s a copy of the form Deaton filled out. For Derek. Derek needed the letter of recommendation since he was been incognito and then a wanted criminal, then acquitted, then incognito again.” He frowned, annoyed when Stiles didn’t respond. “He’s _going_ to that college, Stiles. His address on the back is right next to the campus.”

Stiles swallowed, looking down properly at the leaflet for the first time. His finger traced the edge of the glossy paper. His throat felt thick, useless. “So you stole your boss’s mail. What am I supposed to do with this?” he breathed, nearly whispered. Because if Derek had wanted him to know he was so close, he would’ve told Stiles, right?

Scott reached forward, squeezing his shoulder. “Go talk to him.”

“Sure,” Stiles snorted. “Just make the two hour drive to Beacon Valley and knock on his door and say–”

“I’ve missed you, I can’t stop thinking about you,” Scott interjected.

Stiles stared, dumbstruck. “Yeah, if I want to get punched in the face.”

Scott sighed. “I know you. If you don’t get some closure, one way or another, you’ll spend the rest of your life wondering. And Stiles, what you said, before? It can change, but it never goes away.” His eyes were soft, in a way they always were when he talked about Allison, even though the sadness that had been there for so long had lessened somewhat. He sounded pensive, and though Scott’s experience on the matter wasn’t exactly the same, Stiles knew he understood it better than most bitten wolves.

Allison was still Scott’s anchor, even when though they hadn’t been together for a long time before she’d died, even though Scott was head over heels with Kira now. He still carried this little light of her with him, burning quietly in the far recesses of his mind. Not love, exactly, but a connection that no one could blow out.

Stiles dragged a hand through his hair and groaned, flipping the college leaflet open and looking at the address Derek had penned into the corner above his request to Deaton.

“So you saw this on Deaton’s desk and stole it?” Stiles asked, incredibly proud of his friend’s criminal activity. After all these years he was finally having an effect on him.

“All in the name of love, dude.”

“You’re a hopeless romantic,” Stiles complained, glaring sharply when he saw Scott beaming. “That’s not a compliment. You disgust me!”

Laughing, Scott grabbed Stiles’s larger rucksack out of his closet and started shoving clothes into it for him. He was literally the best.

_*_

_Stiles jumped when his dad walked into his room while knocking simulatenously, only to catch him staring at the postcards he usually kept in a pile in the corner of his desk. Whatever his dad had been about to say fell along with his expression, his eyes growing warmer. “Kiddo, haven’t you talked to him yet?”_

_“A text here a postcard there,” Stiles offered, but his dad’s hard stare told him that wasn’t what he meant. Dragging a hand through his hair with a heavy sigh, Stiles shoved the bundle of cards in his desk drawer before spinning on his desk chair to meet his dad’s knowing gaze. “When does Derek ever use words, dad?”_

_Never, before it’s too late._

_“Well, you’re pretty good at talking, send the guy a text. Pick up the damn phone and spend some of those inclusive minutes or something, alright?”_

_*_

He texted his dad just as he leaped into the car and started the engine.

TO: Dad [1.27PM]

Last minute road trip. Dinner in the fridge. Veggies included. Don’t stay up too late.

FROM: Dad [1.45PM]

Werewolf road trip? If it’s supernatural call me.

TO: Dad [1.47PM]

Sort of supernatural in that Derek is supernatural and I need to ask him some things that I’m pretty sure he’ll hang up on if I discuss over the phone. He’s got a place just outside Beacon Valley. Apparently. I can be home before midnight.

FROM: Dad [1.50PM]

Not going to stay after the long drive?

FROM: Dad [1.51PM]

It’s a long drive to just ask a few questions.

FROM: Dad [1.57PM]

Condoms in the bathroom cabinet.

TO: Dad [2.06PM]

WHY DO YOU HAVE CONDOMS?!!!

FROM: Dad [2.09PM]

Call me when you get there safe. Don’t get into any trouble ok?

TO: Dad [2.11PM]

We are talking about this when I get back!

_*_

He made good time to the little college town just outside Beacon Valley and he was grateful for the lack of traffic since his mind had been racing with scenarios and obsessive planning for every eventuality. Plans that, no doubt, would evacuate his brain the second those eyebrows greeted him of their own volition.

He was practically vibrating with nerves and at a complete loss for what he was doing when he pulled into the gas station. He paid on autopilot before heading back to the Jeep. He was staring without really seeing at the pump, waiting for his tank to fill when he realised what was going on inside the kiosk.

Served him right for thinking even _he_ couldn’t get into any trouble on a little drive to Beacon Valley.

The pregnant clerk hand her hands up, arms shaking as the guy on the other side of the counter aimed a handgun at her. Stiles’s stomach plummeted. He dropped to the ground, creeping swiftly toward the door.

The guy looked twitchy as hell, his arms quivering where he held the gun but to Stiles’s surprise, she didn’t go for the cash register and the gunman didn’t ask her to. There was a brief moment where the vitriol he was screaming at her rushed through his mind without really registering, even though he knew it was important. Then the man fired two shots into the air before turning the gun back on her and Stiles moved without even thinking.

“Hey!” He kept his hands raised, slowly approaching. The man turned the gun on him instead. “The cops are on their way. So let’s just keep calm, okay? Don’t turn a little smash and grab into two murder charges.” His voice was low, calm in a way he didn’t feel, not at all. It trembled a little at the end but remained mostly steady as he held the man’s gaze, glancing only briefly to see the pregnant woman pressing herself back against the wall, face pale, eyes wide.

Eyes flaring _gold_.

Oh shit.

Stiles felt his stomach and throat go tight with nerves, squeezing like a fist was throttling both as the man staggered closer to him, high or drunk or hurting for both most likely.

“You wanna be a hero kid? You wanna be a tough guy, huh? You don’t even know what’s going on here. They’re monsters, you got me? Fucking animals. The whole lot of them. They’re trying to take over this town.”

Stiles backed up instinctively as the gun was waved ever-closer to his face.

“You stay right there!” the man snapped, right in front of him now, gun right in Stiles’s face. “Would you still stick your neck out if you knew what she could do? Huh?! If you saw what that mutt in her belly will do to you in just a few years?”

“There are more qualified people to keep track of omegas than you, buddy,” Stiles tried levelly, voice hard with tension. “Werewolf and hunter alike. You’re not needed here.”

Both the woman and the man started, evidently not expecting Stiles to know what was happening. But the man recovered quickly. “She’s no omega. There’s a whole damn pack of them just moved in a few months back, they already own the gas station and the deli and the library. This town isn’t up for grabs.”

“Really not for you to decide.” Stiles thought of all the work Argent had been doing with the Hunter’s Guild alongside packs like Satomi Ito’s for them to manage the supernatural together. Last he’d heard things had been settling into somewhat of a routine of late. He took a wild stab in the dark. “Argent has approved them to settle here, you’d know that if you were part of the guild. I’m sure they’d be interested to know a vigilante werewolf hunter is drawing attention to the supernatural by attacking innocent women–”

The press of shot-warm metal to his head made his blood turn to ice. Stiles’s tongue stuck to the top of his mouth. The pregnant woman screamed and Stiles quivered with the sound, the same way he did when Lydia screamed, the signal of an oncoming end.

“Don’t move!” Stiles cried out to her when she made an abortive move to help him, voice breaking, because he couldn’t move, couldn’t even try to escape if it meant she might get shot instead. If she dropped down, if she got out of the way maybe he could…

“I don’t know who you think you are, kid,” the gunman sneered dangerously, “but that beast over there isn’t innocent and I don’t care what guild members Hale had to pay blood money to to get his new little pack the stamp of approval. A dog is a dog and if you’re going to stand with them. You’re one of them.”

The hammer of the gun clicked back. Stiles squinted shut.

The door crashed open, ricocheting off the back wall it sounded like. Stiles couldn’t see it, could only see the woman as she screamed again, dropping down and out of sight and curled around her unborn child. He saw the gunman’s wrecked face drop with horror, staring in the direction of the doorway.

A blood-shuddering snarl tore through the air, making the windows tremble and Stiles knew a moment of confused relief before he even really knew what was happening. The gunman’s arm twitched, dropped just an inch. Stiles moved.

He knocked his arm sideways, away from him, away from the door. He threw his balled fist into the man’s face as hard as he could, pain splitting across his bare knuckles even as the man staggered back into the shelves.

The gun didn’t drop as he’d hoped. Instead the man raised the gun again but before Stiles could even veer backward, a familiar warning growl made his very bones tremble. He saw a flash of red then a spray of blood splattered across his face. He reared back on instinct, clipping his head on the corner of the display cabinet and he went down.

_*_

_Lydia and Scott commandeered him right before Christmas to cheer him up, under the guise of Christmas shopping. They ended up spending half their time carrying Lydia’s bags around from shop to shop and the rest of the time in the arcade before eating way too much food and crashing out in the food court of the mall. There, they eased their bloated stomachs by taking cruel enjoyment from watching the panicked other customers rushing around getting their last minute gifts._

_While they were deciding if they wanted to see a movie, Stiles drifted over to the kitsch little gift shop next-door to the movie theatre and picked up a postcard almost without thinking about it. It was an artsy aerial shot of Beacon Hills taken from an outcropping somewhere in the preserve that made it look far cooler than it actually was. He hesitated only for a moment before pulling out his phone and snapping a photo of it._

_TO: Derek [7.18PM]_

_Today was actually one of the better days._

_For obvious reasons. He didn’t get a chance to look at the reply from Derek until after he, Scott and Lydia exited the movie theatre arm in arm a few hours later._

_FROM: Derek [8.10PM]_

_Same. Having a lot of good days actually._

****

_TO: Derek [10.00PM]_

_Don’t you miss anything about BH?_

****

_TO: Derek [10.01PM]_

_A certain human with gradually improving insomnia and a PopTart addiction for example?_

_TO: Derek [10.09PM]_

_Totally joking btw._

_FROM: Derek [10.400PM]_

_I miss a lot of things._

_TO: Derek [10.45PM]_

I’m one of them though right?

_Stiles fell asleep with his phone in his hand waiting for Derek’s reply. When he woke up in the morning it was to a picture message of a stack of waffles smothered in syrup and the caption:_ They’re not ‘A la Stilinski’ but they’re pretty good. You’d like them.

_Stiles knew he was screwed._

_*_

Stiles woke to a woolly feeling in his head and he winced at the brutality of the muted indoor lighting as he squinted his eyes open. He was in an unfamiliar bedroom, all soft greys and silvers, on a large bed with the softest blankets over him. When his eyes focussed, it was to find Derek Hale sitting at his bedside. His chin was rested on his knuckles, concern making his usual scowl softer and when Stiles twitched his fingers, Derek’s hand drew back and Stiles realised why his head didn’t hurt as much as it should’ve done. The pain drain was one of the best benefits of running with wolves.

“What happened to the guy with the gun?” Stiles mumbled out, tentatively pushing himself into a sitting position on the generous bed. A glance down revealed his chest clad in a dark green Henley that wasn’t his own and his face coloured. “Uh, did you…strip me?”

Derek winced. “There was blood on your shirt, I washed it. I didn’t touch your jeans.”

Stiles shook his head slightly, fingering the back of his skull and feeling tenderness but no bumps or cuts to make note of. “If I’d had to place a bet on the first words you’d say to me after almost a year, I probably should’ve put money on them,” he mused. When their eyes met again, it was like he was seeing with new eyes. It was like seeing the complex puzzle of his feelings, of this _thing_ between them from a new angle. He didn’t know everything about it, about anchors and werewolves but he knew what he felt for Derek had been magnified a thousand-fold after seeing him again.

His lips parted in speech, only to hang open uselessly for a moment before words reached them. “Lemme see.”

Like always, Derek just knew what he meant. His gaze swept over Stiles, studying him carefully and when their gazes locked again, his eyes bloomed alpha red.

Stiles felt a tingle in his chest, like he’d felt on and off for so long, recognition and so much more. “How did you do it? I thought…I thought you didn’t want to be the alpha?”

He wondered how Derek would fare now, as an alpha, and knew a moment of sadness for the alpha he could’ve been back then too, given more of chance. It seemed like he was making better of his second chance.

Crimson faded back to that beautiful grey-green-hazel and Derek rose to his feet, grabbing the glass of water off the side and pressing it into his hands. He didn’t reply until Stiles had drunk at least half of it in tiny sips.

“I was never meant to be, I wasn’t prepared for it,” Derek said levelly as he sat back in the chair beside the bed. “Cora and I were on a road trip, just…travelling. Sometimes we stopped and worked with Chris and the guild on some cases, sometimes we met some people who knew…knew my mother, before. Sometimes we were just seeing all the places we wanted to see. But we came across this small pack near Carson City where the alpha was…” He shifted back to sit properly in the chair. “He was a worse alpha than I ever was, let’s put it that way and he…the pack were…”

Stiles licked his dry lips. “He hurt them.”

Derek rested his mouth against his knuckles. “You met one of them. Dana, she was really early on in her pregnancy then. She’s tough as nails but she couldn’t risk the baby and the other three were so young. And we couldn’t ignore it.”

“And their alpha left you no other choice.”

Derek snorted a humourless laugh. “It didn’t start out like that, no. But when we confronted him, stopped him from killing Dana’s kid brother, he turned on Cora and…” He gestured toward himself. That was that. Derek had somehow inherited a small pack all over again and yet…yet Stiles thought he looked as if he had everything under control this time around.

Stiles' gaze roved Derek's face, his expression still soft with worry and relief both, eyes reflecting the gentle lights of the bedside lamps. He'd never looked so at ease in his own skin. And he'd never looked so beautiful. Stiles felt his breath catch a little as he stared at him, feel a little prickle of something through his skin, his cheeks as they stared at each other. "It looks good on you," he admitted.

Derek ducked his head with a little smile.

Clearing his throat a little, Stiles sipped a little more at his water, more for something to do than actually wanting a drink. When he sat the glass down on the side table, however, he got a good look at the broken skin of his split knuckles.

"Shit," he winced, poking tentatively at the edges. "This better not get infected or anything."

"Lemme see." Without waiting for an answer, Derek reached for him and Stiles felt his stomach swoop at the feel of warm, soft hands, broad yet tender fingertips.

Derek's brows furrowed with concentration as he studied the broken skin. "It's not too bad. I keep some supplies just in case."

"Habit when you used to run with humans I guess?" Stiles mused, earning himself another subtle little smile before Derek left to grab the first aid kit. When he returned and cleaned up the scrapes, smoothing some antiseptic over the flesh, it took him a moment to realise that Derek was drawing the pain away as he worked.

"Uhh, it's okay, you don't have to do that. I've had worse," he protested lightly, feeling accountably awkward at the kind gesture.

Derek shrugged. "It's fine."

"So you've been working pretty close with Argent and the guild?"

Derek nodded. "It's a starting point. My...my mother would've done it. If she were here."

That easy admission was a clear example of how far Derek had come, perhaps how far they had come together. It startled Stiles a little, his lips parting, tongue moistening them nervously as he took in the words, the way Derek had sounded.

"It's good. I mean...all this started with Hales and Argents for all the wrong reasons. Now this new chapter is starting, a better beginning and it's Hales and Argents at the helm, so to speak." For a split second he was worried he'd pushed too far, but Derek just nodded, wrapping Stiles' knuckles with the same tender concentration.

"Certainly helps speed up the process of approving your own new pack safety checks when you're at the top," he quipped lightly. And as easy as that he banished the lingering awkwardness and chased a little laugh from Stiles' lips.

"Dude, you are totally cheating the system before it's even fully off the ground.” He revelled in the sparkle in Derek's eyes when he drew back and started packing the first aid kit away.

"How did you find me?" Stiles asked.

Derek looked uncomfortable for a moment. “I live just down the road from the gas station.” He gestured to the room in general, needlessly clarifying that his home was where they now sat. “It was an old development of starter homes that were run down, were going to be demolished, but Cora and I bought the estate, we're doing the houses up one by one for the pack. It has communal space and each house has a garden, space to grow..." He sounded almost daydreamy, full of hope in a way stiles had never gotten to see him before. He was loathe to turn the conversation back from this sweet tangent they'd gone off on, but Derek seemed to realise he needed answers because he visibly came back to himself.

"When you're an alpha, the senses you have as a beta magnify tenfold. I...felt something was wrong and then I heard it, and I felt..." He tightened his lips and exhaled through his nose, frustrated at not having the right words, it seemed.

Stiles just nodded. "I get it, you're the alpha, you sensed Dana was in trouble. So you came running."

Derek turned his gaze away. "I sensed you first."

Stiles blinked. "What?"

"I was heading out to meet you. I was already out the door when I sensed this wrongness. I felt you, coming closer, then you stopped... I was already on my way there, Stiles."

Stiles licked his lips again absently. "Because of me?"

How had he never noticed that Derek was just as much of an awkward, socially challenged idiot as him except in a completely different, completely adorable way. And of course, in typical Derek style, he pushed his body into action, diverting his mind and attention away from the question he didn’t quite know how to answer.

He reached forward, tilting Stiles’s head to the side with a gentle but sure touch, assessing the damage to Stiles’s cheekbone where the guy had pistol-whipped him earlier. It was unhesitating, certain that he could touch Stiles, that it would be welcome. Comfortable and even though the contact was platonic, was medical even, he couldn’t help but feel something at the warmth from his skin.

“That asshole put up quite the fight when the guild guys turned up to take him away, think he ended up in worse shape than you.” Derek sounded unrepentantly pleased and Stiles grinned at his vicious streak, even if his cheek ached.

It was good to see his biting humour, to hear how humans were being punished for their wrongs against the supernatural as well as the other way around, how the new guild was working so well. Mostly though, he felt the questions he’d felt building up inside him clawing their way up his throat with increasing urgency, like a desperate rush of adrenaline or fear or desire, until he couldn’t swallow it back anymore.

He felt the tingling pull of Derek trying to draw the pain from his bruised cheekbone and covered the hand resting closest to it gently. “Derek,” he said softly, “just… _stop_ for a second.”

Derek’s brow furrowed. “Stop what?”

“Stop…taking care of me, stop being the alpha and just be Derek, just _look at me_ for a second.”

“I _am_ looking at you.”

Stiles sighed, rolling his eyes and gently drawing Derek’s hand away from his face, but not releasing it, instead holding it firmly between both of his own. “Are we ever going to talk about this? About you and me and this… _stuff_? Because it seemed we were going to and then you just up and left me in the desert with only _Scott_ as my closest insight to all this, Scott, Derek, who I love like a brother but has severely limited experience with stuff. What with only being a werewolf for a couple of years, only it’s not just werewolf stuff, not for me anyway but I’m not sure if it was _for you_ and I couldn’t exactly text you and ask you ‘hey dude, am I your anchor? And like…if I am, what does that even mean for me?’ I didn’t think they had a postcard for that sort of occasion.”

Derek’s cheeks coloured. He may be doing things right as an alpha this time around, but in ways like this, he seemed to be just as much of a mess as ever, just like Stiles. It was sort of comforting and it made him all the more stunning to behold. He watched Stiles with that furrow of confusion between his dark brows, his mouth and his eyes and his stupid Henley shirt, everything about him so insanely soft.

“It doesn’t have to mean anything to you,” he said carefully.

Stiles let out a long, shaky breath as he processed everything Derek was saying and wasn’t saying by the few words he’d actually given voice to. He pulled himself onto the edge of the bed, feeling a little woozy but largely okay, even as his mind raced.

“What if I want it to?” Stiles asked, because seriously, what did Derek think he’d come all this way for, because he _didn’t_ want it to? “What if you’d just asked me back then? Do you even know what the last year or so has felt like? Do you know what it felt like to be left like that when I thought… _God_ , I thought–”

“You thought right,” Derek cut across him firmly, shifting back just enough to put a little breathing space between them, but not pulling his hand from Stiles’s grasp. “I was going to tell you, before Mexico, I was going to tell you so many times but I didn’t want you to think it was because of that that I was there with you. And then after what happened, when I shifted fully, my head was so messed up I just had to get far and away from everything.”

“Even me?”

“Especially you. All I could see was you. And I couldn’t let history repeat itself. Not with you.”

Stiles’s face must’ve darkened with the rage he felt swelling inside him at the implication of those words, because Derek’s expression suddenly looked a bit panicked.

“Not because you’re the same, but because I was worried _I_ was the same.” He sighed heavily and dragged a hand through his hair in a gesture he could’ve only got from Stiles. When he looked up again, it was a hesitant, fleeting thing from under thick lashes. “I needed space to find out who the hell I was without Beacon Hills throwing hand grenades at me every second.”

“And you couldn’t have spared a second to tell me any of that?”

“Not…not the way I’m telling you now,” Derek almost whispered, looking a little pained, embarrassed, as if whatever he was about to say filled him with great shame. “I felt like…like I was on autopilot, all I knew was when the dust cleared, I had to get out and I had to get out fast before I could breathe.”

A fight or flight reflex, shock or maybe just years of trauma culminating to that one moment – that one breaking point. Stiles felt something inside him settle at that, nodding slightly as he chewed his lip in thought. Because hadn’t he felt something pretty similar before himself?

They weren’t touching now, but they were still close. They weren’t running away and no imminent disaster or family members were coming to interrupt. The smoke had cleared and for the first time ever they were just two people far from the battlefield, wondering if they could still fit together somehow in spite of the patchwork of old scars and glazed fractures.

“I felt something. When you were laying there, when you were…” Stiles licked his lips. “And when you came back, as the wolf, it was like someone had set an electric current through my blood or something. I didn’t feel what you felt or anything just… it was like I felt your light going out, but then it flared brighter than ever, until I was _vibrating_ with it, you know?”

Derek considered him for a long time, during which Stiles thought back to Scott’s expression when he’d tried to explain what an anchor felt like and the words, _“The anchor doesn’t keep you grounded in place, it keeps you grounded in yourself. It doesn’t control your feelings or thoughts, your thoughts and feelings are what decides it…”_

“Is it always like that?” he asked.

Derek shook his head. “Only where there is a strong connection.”

And he’d reached Derek somehow through dreams, something Scott had never heard of, something even Deaton had said was rare when Scott had done some anonymous digging for him. That meant whatever this was between them was pretty strong if it exacerbated the supernatural to that extent, right?

“Oh,” Stiles breathed. His head was a jumbled, chaotic place at the best of times but now it felt dead silent, like every thought, every question he’d longed to ask had dropped to the ground leaving deafening silence in their wake. But he couldn’t remember how to function in the quiet. He found his fingers worrying the hem of his borrowed shirt, until Derek’s hand rose to cover his own.

At last, Stiles risked a surreptitious sideways glance at Derek, only to freeze at the sight of him, head slightly canted, gaze searching.

“I never meant to make you feel like I didn’t…” Derek winced. “I just had to–”

“You had to get your head together, I get that, Derek, you don’t have to apologise for that,” Stiles said gently. Derek’s hand gripped his tighter.

“But there are a million things I should’ve said as soon as I could and I didn’t.” He ducked his head in that way he did, hiding his eyes without really hiding his face. It was as if he didn’t want to hide his expression from Stiles but a part of him made an instinctive, aborted movement to try anyway. “I’m not even sure I can explain it all now.”

Stiles nodded slowly as he tried to make sense of his thoughts, of Derek’s words, of what that meant for the way he felt. He licked his lips absently. He searched Derek’s face, the shining vulnerability in his eyes and ached with how much he’d missed him. “So don’t,” Stiles said huskily, letting his fingers curl in Derek’s shirt, feeling the way he tensed, but not from fear, seeing the way Derek studied him hopefully as he leaned in. It was the same way he felt.

Fuck his lashes were so thick and soft and Stiles’s eyes roved his cheekbones, down to his lips. Then Derek moved. So fast and yet with such tenderness that Stiles felt caught up floating somewhere above the ground. Derek cupped the back of his neck so lightly, held him with all this power and yet gentleness as he pressed against him, not quite standing, not quite kneeling on the edge of the bed over Stiles but everywhere all at once.

Stiles felt himself rock backward at the intensity until Derek’s hands steadied him, until he wrapped his arms around Derek’s neck. Every time their mouths parted, little frenzied gasps punctuated the breathless quiet, foreheads, noses and cheeks pressing together searchingly.

Then Stiles felt the barest touch of tongue to his lips, one he answered with a flick of his own, something like teasing, something like an echo of the playfulness they’d always shared and it drew an almost hurt sound out of Derek as they tumbled back onto the bed.

They slid up the sheets without ever parting in a slow, undulating stretch of tangled limbs. When they settled, Stiles let his fingers trail up the inside of Derek’s shirt, just to feel, without the urgency for anything more. Derek made a humming noise in his throat he wasn’t quite sure was human, nosing into his neck and doing the same. He brushed his fingers to touch Stiles’s side through his shirt, the little line of his stomach exposed between dishevelled shirt and jeans.

“Open your eyes,” Derek murmured, voice almost hoarse with emotion. He ran the tip of his nose along the side of Stiles’s in feather-light tenderness. “Look at me.”

Stiles let his eyes flutter open, feeling flushed and exposed, as high as a kite at finding Derek right there, hovering over him, face so close there was nowhere to hide. He seemed content to look though, to see, where Stiles felt almost pained from not kissing him.

His breath left him in a rough exhale before he dragged Derek down to him again. Their bodies met but it was Derek’s mouth Stiles wanted more than even the air he was struggling to breathe in through rough, clumsy kisses. He squirmed impatiently when Derek nosed at his jaw, his neck, dipping his own head to try and steal more kisses. They rolled onto their sides, still locked together, mouths moving to and from each other and hips rolling together almost as an afterthought.

“Please,” Stiles gasped out when Derek nuzzled infuriatingly at his collarbone, because it wasn’t enough, he had to be closer, he had to tie their limbs together until there was no separating them. “Just…I need, please, I–”

“Sssh,” Derek murmured softly, sounding more collected and softer than Stiles had ever heard him. He kissed him soundly then, curving one arm around Stiles’s shoulders to hold him close, to thread fingers through his hair so, so painfully gently until Stiles felt giddy from his warmth.

If ever he’d been worried it was charity still, he wasn’t worried now.

Derek didn’t have to say the words for Stiles to know what it felt like.

Stiles’s felt like he was soaring, swooping far beyond the reach of anyone else. A kite riding wind, blissful and lighter than the world with Derek the strings holding him steady. He felt hot and giddy and free like he’d never felt before and Derek didn’t have to explain, because Stiles just knew. He knew this wasn’t anything more or less than him anchoring Derek in exactly the same way. Securing him to the best parts of himself in great pleasure or darkness, letting him run wild with pain or fly with bliss and tethering him to himself when he was ready to come back down.

It was amplified because of what Derek was, but the feelings themselves, the nature of it wasn’t supernatural in the slightest. And because of that connection between them, some of that spilled back over to Stiles, making his skin hum with the intensity of it. Derek was his anchor too.

Broad, strong fingers were in constant motion over his back, his sides, his neck, as if they feared stilling for even a moment. Stiles just held onto Derek tight, cupping his throat and jaw. He smiled delightedly into their messy, incoherent kisses when Derek let out a short, husky whine at the sweeping movement of Stiles’s thumb over the shell of his ear. 

“Can I touch you?” Derek breathed out between kisses, even as Stiles rocked into Derek’s thigh.

“You’d better. Everywhere. Like now.”

A low laugh dusted against his parted lips and Derek’s skittering hands gripped his ass then, hauling him in close to press their groins together. Stiles swung a leg over his hip to get closer, to get the hot, tight, not-quite-enough pressure right where he wanted it. After a few clumsy thrusts however, Stiles reached between them to tug his jeans and boxers down, squirming to kick them off his legs even as he bit at Derek’s jaw and struggled to get his pants undone at the same time.

Derek half-growled, nudging Stiles’s chin to expose the line of his throat, the tender flesh he rubbed raw with prickly stubble before kissing the burn. He swatted Stiles’s hands away to shimmy out of his own clothes in the most clumsy, overeager move Stiles had ever caught him executing, then he hauled Stiles in close again. They rutted against each other, breathing skittering in a too-quick rhythm into the minute space between them.

It was like a clumsy battle of who could touch who first, who could hold who closest. Stiles wanted to melt into him and he knew Derek wanted the same. They writhed together in an increasingly frantic tangle. Stiles felt Derek’s knuckles against his belly, hand evidently caught between wanting to touch, needing to ask but not wanting to stop kissing Stiles’s jaw and mouth long enough.

Consent was a thing with Derek, a big thing and Stiles both loved and lamented that, would talk to him about it eventually but not now because his belly was tight and tense and hot. He stole his hand between them to stroke them both together, fast and hard between their bodies.

When he sucked the lobe of Derek’s flushed ear into his mouth Derek made that almost hurt noise again and tensed. He gripped the back of Stiles’s neck hard and held him close against his own neck, snuffling in rough gasps into Stiles’s hair as he jerked against him. With a few more strokes, Stiles followed him into static sharp bliss.

They were an utter mess, both still wearing their shirts, now damp. The first thing Stiles noted was that Derek was nuzzling into his hairline, slow, barely-there movements of his nose against his skin. It was like he was scenting and Stiles hummed happily, curling his numb, shaking fingers into Derek’s soiled Henley and just going with it.

His eyes were stinging still from the sharp release and the growing, beautiful ache blooming in its wake. He felt like he might come apart with the intensity but Derek was still holding him, thumbs almost bruising at his nape and it was so good he only had to breathe.

“I missed you so bad it hurt,” he admitted into the safe space between their bodies and Derek exhaled shakily.

“Me too.” He squeezed one last time at the back of Stiles’s neck before releasing him and wrapping an arm around him to hold him close as he rolled onto his back.

Stiles came to rest with his head on the pillow right next to Derek’s, face tucked into his neck on a bed that smelled of them both. He wrapped his own arm around Derek.

He thought maybe he dozed. He jerked to awareness from the chill settling into his bare legs and grumbled unhappily, fidgeting around with his toes to try and pull the blankets over them without moving. Derek gave a huff of amusement, gently disentangling their limbs enough to tug his shirt off, using it to mop the worst off them both before tossing it to the ground and pulling the blankets up over them both.

Derek hesitated a beat too long before sliding back in close though and so Stiles cracked open an eye. “What?” he asked, a note of interest to his voice because Derek didn’t look regretful or unwilling, only distracted.

Derek’s fingers smoothed along the line of Stiles’s collarbone. “Turn over?”

Stiles was loose-limbed and still a bit giddy, so he rolled compliantly, and before it could occur to him to worry Derek was trying to escape the intimacy of being face to face, he felt the subtle pressure of his mouth and nose at his nape. His stomach quivered. It was Derek’s own kind of intimacy and Derek’s own way of asking for it, being comfortable enough to ask for it. He smiled to himself, shivering at the little prickle of beard.

The arm his head was resting on twisted a little so Derek’s fingers could thread through his mussed hair, while Derek’s other arm wrapped around him, hauling him back against a warm chest under the sheets.

“Cold?” Derek asked in his ear.

“No way, comfiest I’ve been ever,” Stiles mumbled, eyes closed, so relaxed he felt like goo as Derek scented the back of his neck. “Good Alpha,” he couldn’t help but tease. He felt the brief scrape of teeth in mock punishment and chuckled into the bed sheets.

*

TO: Dad [9.58PM]

Staying over after all. Derek has missed the Stilinski waffle special.

FROM: Dad [10.02PM]

Good news kid. Take a few days. Just let me know when you’ll be home.

TO: Dad [10.13PM]

So you can have time to hide the evidence of all the take-out you’re eating? NO WAY! Gotta keep you on your toes.

TO: Dad [10.14PM]

Also Derek says hi.

FROM: Dad [10.20PM]

Tell him don’t be a stranger.

“Dad totally misses his favourite son,” Stiles mused as he set his phone down in time to flip the last of the waffles out of the waffle iron. Once on the plates, he smothered them with ice-cream and syrup. Good job sugar didn’t affect him like most people and that Derek had a metabolism so fast it wouldn’t touch him at all.

He’d said they needed to have morning after food, even if it wasn’t technically the morning yet and Derek had just given him that look that was all fondness and exasperation – but also hunger for waffles.

In contrast to Derek’s bedroom, which was immaculately finished and decorated, the rest of the little single-story house was a work in progress. The kitchen had all new utilities and a shiny worktop but the cupboard doors hadn’t been fitted yet and the walls hadn’t been painted. The living room beyond the barely-used kitchen island where they sit together to eat their waffles was literally just a sofa, a TV and new underlay for the carpet that was still packaged to one side, ready to lay.

Stiles took it all in in companionable silence as he chewed, hooking his bare toes behind Derek’s hairy calf muscle and smiling around his mouthful when Derek returned the gesture. It was like those quiet moments they’d shared in his home back in Beacon Hills, except without all the tension of uncertainty between them.

“So…why didn’t you let anyone know you were so close?” he asked softly. Rain pattered on the windows in a gentle flow. When Derek didn’t reply, Stiles looked at him fully. He smirked when he saw colour riding high across his cheekbones and the tips of his ears, his expression mulish and focussed on his plate.

“I wanted to finish the apartment first,” Derek said, shrugging as if it wasn’t anything. “Cora did the bedroom first, said something about the place you sleep being a priority. She really thinks she’s ‘zen’ or something now. So we did the bedroom but we wanted to get Dana and her little brother’s place done first, before the baby came, so my living room, kitchen and bathroom are still...” He trailed off at the start of laughter that burst out of Stiles almost unbidden. Then he scowled. “What?”

Stiles grinned, swallowing his mouthful hastily and washing it down with the coffee Derek had poured him before he choked on that too, laughing. “Oh my god,” he chuckled good-naturedly as he set the half-drained glass down. “You were like… _denning_ for me, weren’t you? Is that a thing? That’s totally a thing, isn’t it? Settling your territory, making your den all spiffy before you invite in any potential–”

A sharp, playfully admonishing little growl cut across him and he groaned into the firm kiss against his lips, all syrup and beard prickling soundness. It was brief but left his head a little hazy and he wobbled on his stool until Derek steadied him, looking far too pleased with his handiwork as he took in Stiles’s expression after. He swiped syrup from the corner of Stiles’s mouth and sucked it off his thumb as easy as breathing, holding his gaze all the while.

“Sorry,” Stiles whispered breathily as he watched the motions of Derek’s mouth. “You’re too cute not to tease.”

Derek canted his head then with an expression torn between pleased and annoyed. His default ‘Stiles’ expression.

Stiles felt unaccountably nervous as he washed his waffles down with the coffee, relishing in the warm caffeine sending sleepy comfort through his already sated bones. Of all the ways he’d fantasized this going, he hadn’t pictured this. This was better than anything even his overactive imagination could come up with.

“I got accepted into UC Beacon Valley you know,” he said conversationally, and Derek’s eyes danced as he drank from his own cup.

“I know.”

“Stalker,” Stiles chuckled, nudging Derek with his knee. “What if I hadn’t decided to go there? Where would you have been then, huh? That’s a lot to stake the future of your pack on.”

Derek shrugged, thumbs tracing the curving handle of the cup thoughtfully. “It was a good location anyway, close to the Guild in _Sacramento_ , close to Scott’s pack if we ever needed backup.” He met Stiles’s gaze so easily now, as if it were natural. “But I knew you’d choose it.”

“Oh yeah?” Stiles teased. “How?”

“Close to your dad, good Criminal Law and Computer Science programmes. Not too far north so you’d feel the cold too badly.”

Stiles laughed at the last and stole the last mouthful of waffle off Derek’s plate. “I could make you suffer and string you along a bit more and pretend to be undignified but you totally have me down and yet still want me and that’s pretty much the most amazing thing ever.”

Derek sighed but he looked content with that assessment. “I wouldn’t have made the choice if it were completely wrong for the pack, but it felt… _right_.” He rolled his eyes then. “Cora said it was fate or something.”

“Maybe she’s right for once,” Stiles mused, resting his head on his hand and drinking in the sight of Derek, sex-mussed and affection-warm around the edges, feet still entangled with his and the scent of syrup clinging to his breath. It was pretty perfect really and things between them wouldn’t always be, he wasn’t naïve enough not to know that, but that was good too. More real, somehow. “Feels pretty right to me too, can’t be an accident, right?”

He knew Derek would worry about what was right for Stiles, if Stiles was doing what he wanted and not just choosing UCBV because of him, but he also thought they could work through that with everything else. They were the same and yet they’d both changed in all the ways that mattered.

He couldn’t wait to see Derek be the alpha he should’ve been when he was first unexpectedly handed the responsibility, maybe stand beside him through whatever trials that brought. He wondered if the little pack would like him, how easily he’d fit in with their still brand new dynamics. He imagined forcing himself to crawl out of the bed they’d curled up in earlier to go to class, imagined Derek picking him up from campus in the Camaro he’d glimpsed out on the driveway through the kitchen windows…

Derek’s hand came to cover his on the countertop. “Come back to bed?”

“As long as you’re aware there are going to be many questions, much talking, possibly until the wee morning hours.” Stiles grinned mischievously, going easily when Derek tugged him to his feet. He wanted to hear about his travels with Cora, about the way he was building his new pack, what he wanted to study at college and why. He wanted to know everything, of course, but most of all he wanted those middle of the night conversations that had brought them closer together back when Stiles was at his lowest.

Complicated green eyes studied Stiles again, as if Derek couldn’t believe this was real either, that they could touch each other so casually. When Derek brought their mouths together the next time it was so soft it was barely there and Stiles sank into him with an exhale that was torn ragged by the tenderness of it. It was almost absent, sweet and brief, like Derek couldn’t help it. Stiles certainly couldn’t help hovering close, staring at Derek’s mouth, then up to his eyes as his fingers stroked absently across Derek’s chest.

“I suppose it’s good that you already know about the snoring and the talking in my sleep.” And the nightmares, but that wasn’t a subject for right then. It was also good that Derek shared his penchant for middle-of-the-night conversations that spun out listlessly into the night when sleep and darkness made everything soft and ethereal. He offered Derek a smirk. “I bet you’re a blanket-hog.”

Derek edged backward, tugging Stiles with him, a challenge sparkling in his eyes. “Come and find out.”


End file.
